Gun Violence

All posts tagged Gun Violence

Securing every public place, metal detectors at soft targets, guards (human or robot) everywhere are not the solutions we need.

Orlando should not be a call to lock things down. Think about what has helped the LGBT community the most over the years: openness, understanding, awareness.

We all too often fear the wrong things. Terrorism and mass killings strike our nerves, but we overlook all the other things that are far more likely to kill us (car accidents, disasters, carcinogens, environmental toxins, climate change, to name a few).

This writer puts too much emphasis on physically securing things. He cites Israel and Ireland in the 80’s. These are not the places we should strive to build.

Openness and tolerance paired with vigilance is a better path. Keeping harmful weapons from people likely to use them would help. There is no valid argument not to require licencing and registration of weapons. Better awareness and treatment of mental health and domestic violence issues would be preferable to fences. For that matter treating underlying causes of violent tendencies would be a good place to start. Poverty, marginalization, extremism, fundamentalism, these are the things that drive mass killings. Let’s hear about some solutions for these issues.

The random killing last week on a San Francisco pier is so soaked in political agenda that neither side of the irrelevant arguments about immigration and sanctuary rules can see that better implementation of existing laws could have prevented this one.

But, of course, this is San Francisco. Instead of pulling back and taking a hard look at policies, the true believers doubled down. Nothing wrong with the way the sanctuary law was enforced, they said. This is simply a case of a disturbed, irrational individual, with no record of violence, who went off the rails.

Which has the troubling ring of what pro-gun advocates are saying about the church shootings in South Carolina. Although the country is awash in guns, there’s no problem with the laws. It was just this single, crazed young gunman, Dylann Roof, with a drug record but no history of violence (just like Lopez-Sanchez), on a mission of hate. Nothing you can do about that.

The discussion going on about the random killing in SF and the City’s sanctuary rule misses the point by so far its really difficult to read about. This article at least sees the real issue.

Things that bother the staff here about the debate:

-Random killings happen quite often in the US. This one is not fundamentally different.

-It demeans other victims of violence to attach more importance to this killing or to that of the 9 church goers in Charleston.

-Making a fuss because this wackjob is an immigrant, was let out of jail, and has been deported multiple times is about political agendas, not the real problems.

-Those real problems are gun violence and mental health.

-Tying a bunch of hot button issues together makes this into more than it should be.

-There are tons of immigrants who have been let out of jail under sanctuary rules, been deported multiple times and they HAVEN’T committed random acts of violence.

-There are tons of natural born US Citizens who haven’t been to jail who HAVE committed random acts of homicidal violence.

I like the way this writer puts it:

We live in a world that is obsessed with data. We use this data to solve problems. If your doctor runs a test on you that says you’re lactose intolerant, you stop consuming dairy. You don’t say, “Well, I know my body can’t process lactose, so it’s gotta be the cookie I ate with my glass of milk that made me sick.” Why, then, are we allowing the national media to tell us that, despite guns being the one single thing linking 25,233 shootings this year, undocumented immigrants are the cause of the problem?

Or at least the cause of the problem this week until the next shooting happens, and they blame it on something else.

I also like his take on immigration:

This is a city built by gold miners, queers, war refugees, sex workers, artists, poets and inventors. We are a city of immigrants, in a state built by immigrants, in a country founded by immigrants. We have always been a place where people seeking sanctuary and refuge have been welcome. San Francisco’s sanctuary law was passed so that undocumented immigrants could report domestic violence, gang activity or unsafe labor conditions, without the fear of being deported. Allowing this tragedy to inflame the debate about immigration just skirts the real issues that our country refuses to deal with, like creating stricter guns laws and treating mental illness like what it is: a disease.